


Some Thoughts You Have While Falling

by aeli_kindara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Universe, Character Study, Falling Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Happy Ending, Human Castiel (Supernatural), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:54:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26560237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: Castiel has fallen many times in many ways, but only one life has flashed before his eyes, and it wasn’t his own. If he could choose any film reel to play, it would be that one. It would be Dean.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 53
Kudos: 252





	Some Thoughts You Have While Falling

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be for the Casversary on Friday, but then... well, things happened. So here it is now!
> 
> Thank you so much to Bea, Cass, and Remmy for the beta & yelling! <3

If Castiel had been asked a thousand years ago, two thousand, he wouldn’t have guessed Kansas.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Kansas. A wind-swept stretch of the middle of a continent; it has its hills, its rivers. Its wildflowers that hold light inside of them. Its sunsets fit to steal the breath of God. But that’s just Earth, and earthly things. They don’t matter. A thousand other places could have birthed the figures of prophecy, and a thousand other battlefields could see them win or fall.

A thousand years ago, two thousand, he wouldn’t have guessed Dean Winchester —

And that’s because he couldn’t have. He, Castiel, angel of the Lord, with all his vast and ageless knowledge of mankind, could not have imagined this secret: these fingers flexed around a steering wheel, the laughter at the corners of these eyes.

_Kansas, Dean Winchester._ The center of the universe. He couldn’t have guessed it, because he couldn’t have known there would be a center to _his_ universe. A home.

\---

There are some thoughts you have, while falling.

The first one is that it takes a long time to fall. Castiel has had this thought before; his life as an angel sometimes seems like one long string of fallings. Some are more literal than others — every time an Enochian blood sigil has blasted him through space; every time he’s felt the heartbeat he shouldn’t have stutter and miss a step. Once, a pawn in Metatron’s spell, he fell like this, like a meteor; but even that wasn’t quite the same.

He’s never chosen it before.

Kansas is still distant below him — more concept than place. The world is blue horizons: troposphere, stratosphere. At this altitude, all lines converge.

The second thought you have while falling is: _Shouldn’t my life start flashing before my eyes?_

His life has been a long one. It would be an interesting exercise, Castiel thinks, to see what pieces of it his consciousness might choose to present in these circumstances. Would he walk the streets of Babylon again? Would he watch that first wriggling fish crawl out onto land?

It’s hard to imagine where it would start. But he knows where it would end: with the Winchesters. With family, the kind of family who hurt each other and fail each other and get up and try again; who love each other more the harder they’re tested. With his own love, the emotions that have riddled him for twelve years now — doorways to beautiful doubt.

Castiel has fallen many times in many ways, but only one life has flashed before his eyes, and it wasn’t his own. If he could choose any film reel to play, it would be that one. It would be Dean.

So he closes his eyes and conjures it: Dean, four years old, in a kitchen, wrapping a hug around his mother’s knees. Dean lighting off fireworks with his brother in an abandoned field. Dean with his eyes hard, hands easy, a weapon — elbow-deep in gore. Dean as a clock strikes midnight. Dean at the side of a bed in a darkened room. Dean, twenty-six, in a Palo Alto apartment; wide grin plastered over all his needs.

Castiel can remember cradling a raw soul in his hands — blood and memory seeping through his fingers. He remembers rebuilding it, piece by careful piece.

There were so many things he didn’t know then, though. He didn’t know about Dean’s eyes on him, soft and grateful or bitter and hard. He didn’t know about Dean’s hand on his shoulder. He didn’t know Dean’s jokes or the movies Dean loves; he didn’t know the confounding necessity of staring, day after day, at Dean’s mouth, and taking years to figure out why.

He knew a little about what Dean’s doing right now: lying on his back on the Impala’s hood, eyes on the stars.

Years pass, but he always looks young like this. _Wearing his father’s old jacket. Somewhere in the desert — hot metal sticks to the leather, an armor he won’t take off._ Or: _A skinny teenager out behind a truck stop. His senses stretched elastic; his eyes wide and dry._ Or: _Barely a child, baby brother cradled in his arms, while the fire rages and the lights strobe red and blue —_

Or now. A mile from the bunker, maybe two, Impala parked in an empty field. There’s a beer to Dean’s lips, grief and resolve in his eyes. Led Zeppelin is playing from the stereo — a mixtape Castiel knows.

He can see everything still — he can peer down through the miles of blue air, into the shadow of the setting sun. He should treasure this glimpse — that he still has enough grace for it. Soon, he’ll never again peer down on Dean from high above.

Maybe, just maybe, he’ll get to watch him from the other side of the Impala’s hood.

The third thought you have while falling is: _I am not nearly so old as I thought._ If Dean looks young, down there below him, Castiel is younger; he is an infant. He was born the day he met this man. He is being born right now.

\---

There is a poet who hails from somewhere on the darkened prairies stretched below him. Somewhere tucked between the rippling hills. She wrote about them once:

_Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone._

Castiel was there for that. He remembers.

It seems almost like yesterday. He has always been ageless — undying — and humans have always been instantaneous. Firefly-flashes, fleeting and beautiful. They are, and they die. Never before Dean had he looked down on one and thought — _You are too young for the weight the world hangs on your shoulders. You are too young to have to be this brave._

The poet also wrote: _Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ descendants, who are going to the store._

It seems unbearably brave, to live while human. To age. To remember your dreams, and the dreams that came before you. To drive to the store.

It seems unbearably brave. Castiel doesn’t know if he can do it. But he’s going to try.

\---

The last thought you have while falling is that very soon you won’t be falling anymore.

The distant earth, your long companion, grows closer by leaps and bounds. You blink, and feel the rushing air on your eyelids; your lungs fight against the wind. First there are streetlights in even lines, long daisy-chains of orange glow; then there are headlights moving along them. Farm lights out in the country like lonely stars — and the dark places. The in-betweens. Rushing ever closer, until they resolve into shapes like trees, like fences.

Shapes like a lonely Impala, hood gleaming just a little in the sliver of moonlight, and the solitary figure propping itself up on its elbows, scrambling to its feet —

Cas goes plowing into the earth. He sends up waves of topsoil; grass goes flying. The last spark of his grace saves him — then dies.

There’s pollen in his nose.

He sneezes.

And then there are hands on his shoulders — his face. Robert Plant is singing, a little tinny, from somewhere nearby. “Cas?” Dean is saying. “Cas, oh, God, Cas —”

Castiel opens his eyes.

Dean’s face is close above his — almost close enough to block out all the stars. It’s torn with joy and worry. His eyes flicker over Castiel’s face.

Castiel tests his human senses. He can’t feel Dean’s heartbeat; he can’t read his thoughts. But there’s the cool night air on his skin. The scent of haying season. The warmth of Dean’s hands on his shoulder, on his chest.

He reaches out to place his own palm over Dean’s sternum. And there is Dean’s heartbeat after all, right there, and his thoughts —

Well. His thoughts are written all over his face. Relief, and love, and worry, still — a kind of worry Castiel can fix.

He raises his head carefully from its cushion of soil, and he kisses Dean’s mouth.

It takes a few seconds. When he’s done, Dean’s eyes are closed; he sways, slightly, when Castiel sits back.

Then he opens his eyes again. Relief, and love; the worry’s all but gone.

Castiel smiles. He feels his mouth curve. He feels Dean’s eyes drop to track it.

“Hello, Dean,” he says.

\---

If Castiel had been asked a thousand years ago, two thousand, he wouldn’t have guessed Kansas.

But then, a thousand years ago, he wouldn’t have known the question.

He might have dreamed the shape of it. Heard it in the whispers of angels who weren’t there anymore, in the echoes of deeds he forgot: _I think you came off the line with a crack in your chassis. You have never done what you were told._

But the question isn’t anything like: _Where will you fall? When?_ Not even _how,_ or _why?_ Those are questions of birthplaces and battlefields, and it isn’t about that, not really; it isn’t about God’s plan or God’s story. It isn’t even about Castiel’s.

He has always been falling.

The question might be: _To what gravity?_

_When you fall — when you finish falling —_

_Where will you land?_

**Author's Note:**

> Also on [tumblr](https://gravelghosts.tumblr.com/post/629776348014116864/spn-fic-some-thoughts-you-have-while-falling).
> 
> The poem Cas quotes is [Invisible Fish](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/101674/invisible-fish-swim-this-ghost-ocean) by Joy Harjo.
> 
> I wrote this fic to stand alone as an ending to many possible stories — but in my head, it's also a coda to my DCBB from last year: [Teaching Poetry to Fish](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21218918/chapters/50517083). If you liked this I think you might like that.
> 
> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed! <3


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